Bad. Dirty. Wrong.
Or as I like to call it, FUN!
Some choice bits from my Portrait of a Lady essay:
On the state of Osmond's manhood:
What Isabel wants in a marriage is someone non-threatening, and she finds that quality in the person of Gilbert Osmond. As Ralph puts it, "Osmond is somehow--well, small," and there's a safety in that for Isabel.
On Isabel and her boundary issues:
Isabel feels that Caspar is finally about to penetrate the wall she’s worked so hard to maintain.
And pretty much this entire paragraph:
"His kiss was like white lightning," James writes, in a passage that makes the cool austerity of the rest of the novel even more evident by contrast. Here, at last, is that "certain light" that Isabel half-longed for, half-feared. Caspar's kiss is raw; it is physical; it is "a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed." It's an orgasm, Isabel's first. Yet she takes no pleasure from it; "While she took it," James writes--for indeed, it is thrust upon her--"she felt each thing in his hard manhood that had least pleased her." That Caspar and "his hard manhood" can provoke this reaction from her is exactly what Isabel has always feared confirmed, made flesh. In Isabel's mind, it is an "act of possession," not of love; or rather, she does not have the capacity to distinguish between the two. With Goodwood pressed up against her, she feels as if she's drowning.
What can I say? I make my own fun.
Now I'm going to go spend the rest of the afternoon reading Faulkner, because in case you didn't know it already, I am a party animal.
Some choice bits from my Portrait of a Lady essay:
On the state of Osmond's manhood:
What Isabel wants in a marriage is someone non-threatening, and she finds that quality in the person of Gilbert Osmond. As Ralph puts it, "Osmond is somehow--well, small," and there's a safety in that for Isabel.
On Isabel and her boundary issues:
Isabel feels that Caspar is finally about to penetrate the wall she’s worked so hard to maintain.
And pretty much this entire paragraph:
"His kiss was like white lightning," James writes, in a passage that makes the cool austerity of the rest of the novel even more evident by contrast. Here, at last, is that "certain light" that Isabel half-longed for, half-feared. Caspar's kiss is raw; it is physical; it is "a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed." It's an orgasm, Isabel's first. Yet she takes no pleasure from it; "While she took it," James writes--for indeed, it is thrust upon her--"she felt each thing in his hard manhood that had least pleased her." That Caspar and "his hard manhood" can provoke this reaction from her is exactly what Isabel has always feared confirmed, made flesh. In Isabel's mind, it is an "act of possession," not of love; or rather, she does not have the capacity to distinguish between the two. With Goodwood pressed up against her, she feels as if she's drowning.
What can I say? I make my own fun.
Now I'm going to go spend the rest of the afternoon reading Faulkner, because in case you didn't know it already, I am a party animal.